Living life to the fullest, really?

A few weeks ago in my teaching time, I took a look at 1 Peter 3:10-17 and discussed what it would mean to live life to the fullest. When I say live life to the fullest, I mean, living each day as a good day, honoring God, praising God, and glorifying God, with our actions, thoughts, and words. The text looked at the tongue, pursuing peace, eagerly doing good, and always being prepared to share the reason for our hope. As I have been praying still about that teaching time a few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to clear 2 things up for my readers and those who might have heard and been in the service that day.

First, why are we living life to the fullest and living each day to the glory of God? Do we live like that because we do it out of duty to Jesus or do we live like that because we delight in Jesus? The Shorter Westminster Catechism ends it's first question with "the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever". That means there in our core part of our being we were designed by God to enjoy Him and delight in who He is. This, I will admit a lot of time for myself, is a struggle to sit and enjoy God and not try and respond out of duty for what He has done for me. We must remember that we can never pay God back for all His grace and mercy to us, and that when we try and pay God back out of duty, gratitude is not involved. To truly delight in God we need to be grateful for what He has done, enjoy the freedom in Him, and learn to enjoy God. Enjoying God looks like a relationship that loves to spend time with, talking with, serving with, and communing with Him. Remember that God wants our delight in Him not our duty. So living life to the fullest should never be about duty to God but should be a life that is delighting in God and the out pouring of that.

Second, do we live life to the fullest because we are trying to buy more of God's grace and mercy in our lives? Writer, Jerry Bridges, calls living life to the fullest, a pursuit of holiness. Can we say we pursue holiness on a daily basis? But Jerry also tells us in his helpful book, "The Disciplines of Grace" that even when we are living life to the fullest and are having a good day, we still can never earn or buy enough good to warrant God's grace and mercy in our lives. Jerry also adds than, that we can never have a bad enough day to not warrant God's grace and mercy in our lives. When we think we can buy God's grace in our lives we start to go the way of duty again and forget about delighting in God and the life and death of Jesus.

So how can we end on the side of delight and not trying to earn or buy God's grace and mercy in our lives? How can we live life to the fullest? That is easy to say but hard to do, we need to preach the good news of the Gospel, Jesus death and resurrection, to ourselves everyday. We need to keep the cross in front of our view at every moment and in each day.